Avalanche (AVAX) is making slight gains in early trading on Tuesday but moves remain muted despite market leader Bitcoin rising above the key $49,000 level. At the time of writing, AVAX/USD is trading at around $66.27.

The DeFi platform has had a bearish week, losing more than 5% of its value over the past seven days despite its rising adoption among projects. One of the biggest advantages Avalanche offers over its competitors is that it touts the fastest smart contract processing capabilities in the industry till date, in terms of time-to-finality. In addition to its high speed transaction processing capabilities, the network also offers lower transaction costs and higher levels of energy efficiency, especially in comparison with Ethereum.

Avalanche Rush Drives On-Chain Activity

On the fundamentals front, the Avalanche Rush program is garnering considerable interest among projects and could support AVAX in the coming sessions. The largest DeFi project by TVL, BENQI, has launched the second phase of its initiative within the incentive program valued at $4 million. The first phase of the initiative helped BENQI see its supply value peak as high at $2.8 billion while borrows exceeded $1 billion.

Meanwhile, its second most popular DeFi protocol Trader Joe has collaborated with the Avalanche Foundation to launch a liquidity mining rewards program valued at $20 million across its entire platform. With a focus to drive growth in native markets the incentives will offer $10 million JOE tokens and $10 million in AVAX to help the project achieve its goal of becoming the largest DEX across all EVM chains.

A popular crypto millionaire Rahul Rai believes that Avalanche holds the most promise as an Ethereum killer and has the capabilities to steal liquidity from the world’s leading DeFi ecosystem. A former analyst at Morgan Stanley, Rai became a millionaire in May 2021 when BlockTower Capital acquired the fund he had co-founded.

In a recent interview with Business Insider, he observes, “These ecosystems have really attracted this huge community of (developers) and now more importantly traders and users. That just makes it highly compelling for early users to adopt the protocol and adopt the chain.”

Technical Analysis of AVAX/USD

According to a leading crypto trader, Altcoin Sherpa, AVAX could be getting ready for another rally soon, powered by the rising interest in NFTs. In a recent post on Twitter, he shared that he did earn some profits when Avalanche’s price touched the $70 mark, but could go higher in the coming sessions.

On the H4 price chart of AVAX/USD, most of the smaller moving averages along with the MACD are indicating a bearish bias. However, the 100 EMA, 200 EMA and 200 SMA as well as the momentum indicator suggest some buying interest as well.

Avalanche’s price is sitting just under the pivot point at $67.76 and further bearish pressure can take it even lower towards testing support at $62.08. On the other hand, an uptick in buyers can see AVAX overcome the pivot point and work its way past the $70 level.